5 Intriguing Things
1. Steve Jobs introducing the first iPhone.
"This is a day I've been looking forward to for two-and-a-half years. Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes around that changes everything and Apple has been—well, first of all, one is very fortunate if you get to work on just one of these in your career—Apple has been very fortunate. It's been able to introduce a few of these into the world. In 1984, we introduced the Macintosh. It didn't just change Apple. It changed the whole computer industry. In 2001, we introduced the first iPod. It didn't just change the way we all listen to music, it changed the entire music industry. Well, today, we're introducing three revolutionary products of this class. The first one is a widescreen iPod with touch controls. The second is a revolutionary mobile phone. And the third is a breakthrough Internet communications device. An iPod, a phone, and an Internet communicator. These are not three separate devices. This is one device. And we are calling it iPhone. Today Apple is going to reinvent the phone." (youtube.com)
2. But really, what was the greatest canal of all time? Maybe not the first one that came to mind.
"My vote still goes to the Grand Canal. By linking the Yangtze and Yellow river basins in the seventh century, it plugged the expanding rice frontier of the south into the booming population and political centers in the north. I like to think of the Grand Canal as a kind of man-made Mediterranean, giving China the same kind of cheap transport that the Mediterranean had given Rome, with comparable results. Tang dynasty China would still have been the greatest power on Earth if it hadn't had the canal, but it was the canal that made it one of the great civilizations of all time, paying for the golden age of Chinese poetry as well as for armies that marched as far as India and Kyrgyzstan and for financiers who created the world's first paper currency." (foreignpolicy.com)
4. Microsoft's long history with smart watches.
"Let’s ever-so-painfully travel back to 2002, when Bill Gates unveiled Microsoft’s Smart Personal Objects Technology (SPOT) at the Comdex tradeshow in Las Vegas. I witnessed Gates trying to wow the Comdex crowd with fancy alarm clocks, keychains, refrigerator magnets, and, yes, smartwatches. These devices would do such amazing things as connect to a wireless network and then tell people about traffic conditions, the weather, and their stock portfolios. (Every technology demo at that time centered on those three tasks.) By 2004, the Microsoft SPOT watches were on the market, but no one wanted to buy them. By 2008, they were gone." (businessweek.com)
+ Bill Buxton's collection of smartwatches from the 1980s onward.
"In one richly ironic column, from early 2011, a group of employees in the highly sensitive 'signals intelligence division' told Zelda they found it hard to swallow what agency critics would, almost certainly without pity, consider a taste of their own medicine. They wrote that they had learned their private messages poking fun at their NSA superiors 'weren’t private after all' and were posted on an internal computer network for all their co-workers to see. In another instance, an employee sought guidance on how to handle a boss who had enlisted 'snitches' to eavesdrop on private office conversations. The Globe obtained the columns under a Freedom of Information Act request." (bostonglobe.com)
Today's 1957 American English Language Tip
close. Close the door, the window, your mouth, used in the literal sense & in everyday speech instead of shut, expose the speaker to grave suspicion of GENTEELISM, though The door is closed forever upon that possibility, & similar figurative uses, are innocent.
It Was the Canal That Made It